I got a job in Oakland at the Indian Center and that helped me to feel more like I belonged somewhere. Then one day I was looking on Craigslist and saw that my tribe in Oklahoma was hiring a youth-services coordinator. That’s what I was doing in Oakland, so I applied not really thinking I would get it. But I got it and moved out to Oklahoma a few months later. Paul was my boss then. We moved in together just a month after I got there. Super unhealthy from the get-go. But part of why it went so fast is because of ceremony. Because of that medicine.
We sat up every weekend, sometimes it was just me, Paul, and his dad if no one else showed up. Paul took care of the fire and I brought in water for Paul’s dad. You don’t know the medicine unless you know the medicine. We prayed for the whole world to get better and felt it could every morning when we came out of the tipi. The world just spins, of course. But it all made perfect sense for a while. In there. I could evaporate and drift up and out through the crisscrossed tipi poles with the smoke and prayers. I could be gone and all the way there at once. But after Paul’s dad died, everything I’d been praying about all that time got turned upside down and emptied on top of me in the form of Paul’s fists.
After the first time, and the second, after I stopped counting, I stayed and kept staying. I slept in the same bed with him, got up for work every morning like it was nothing. I’d been gone since that first time he laid hands on me.
I applied for a job back where I used to work in Oakland. It was the position of events coordinator for the powwow. I had no experience in coordinating events outside of the annual youth summer camps. But they knew me there, so I got the job.
* * *
—
I watch my shadow grow long then flatten on the highway as a car flies by without slowing or seeming to notice me. Not that I want slowing or notice. I kick a rock and hear it ding against a can or some hollow thing in the grass. I pick up my pace and as I do a hot gust of air and the smell of gas blow by with the passing of a big truck.
This morning when Paul said he needed the car all day I decided to take it as a sign. I told him I’d get a ride home with Geraldine. She’s a substance abuse counselor where I work. When I walked out the door, I knew everything I left in that house I’d be leaving for good. Most of it was easy to leave. But my medicine box, the one his dad had made for me, my fan, my gourd, my cedar bag, my shawl—these I’ll have to learn to leave over time.
I didn’t see Geraldine all day and not after work either. But I’d made my decision. I headed to the highway with nothing on me but my phone and a box cutter I took from the front desk before I left.
* * *
—
The plan is to get to OKC. To the Greyhound station. The job doesn’t start for a month. I just need to make it back to Oakland.
A car slows then stops ahead of me. I see red brake lights bleed through my vision of the night. I turn around in a panic, then hear Geraldine, so turn to see her old-ass beige Cadillac her grandma gave her for graduating from high school.
When I get in the car Geraldine gives me a look like: What the fuck? Her brother Hector is laid out in the backseat, passed out.
“He okay?” I say.
“Blue,” she says, scolding me with my name. Geraldine’s last name is Brown. Names that are colors is what we have in common.
“What? Where we going?” I say to her.
“He drank too much,” she says. “And he’s on pain meds. I don’t want him to throw up and die in his sleep on our living-room floor, so he’s riding with us.”
“Us?”
“Why didn’t you just ask me for a ride? You told Paul—”
“He called you?” I say.
“Yeah. I was already home. I had to leave early for this fucker,” Geraldine says, pointing with her thumb to the backseat. “I told Paul you had to stay late with a youth waiting for an auntie to show up, but that we were leaving soon.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“So you’re going?” she says.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Back to Oakland?”
“Yeah.”
“OKC Greyhound?”
“Yeah.”
“Well shit,” Geraldine says.
“I know,” I say. And then our saying this makes a silence we drive in for a while.
I see what I think is a human skeleton leaned against a barbed-wire wood-pole fence.
“Did you see that?” I say.
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“People think they see stuff out here all the time,” Geraldine says. “You know that part of the highway you were walking? Up north a ways, just past Weatherford, there’s a town there called Dead Women Crossing.”